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The Second Amendment
It may be "second" to America, but it is "eleventh" to GodThou shalt bear arms is the 11th Commandment. The Full Text The full and exact text of The Amendment has been the source of conniption fits for liberals since their party started in 1929 with FDR. But, as every good American school child knows, the second amendment to America's Constitution is one clear, precise line: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." And that's all there is to it. "Bearing arms" should never be confused with "arming bears", which is of course a terrible idea that only a Canadian would ever have. Remedies A losing candidate for the Senate is best remembered for saying, “You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And….if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” But I can think of many other problems it could solve. Take lack of civility. If the person you’re about to insult might be carrying a gun, you’ll think better of it. A famous author once said, “An armed society is a polite society.” Take substance abuse. A study showed that substance abusers were twelve times more likely to be homicide victims. Take recessions. The FBI estimates that there are over 200 million privately owned firearms in the US. If the average cost is $100 per gun, this represents $20B of underutilized capital assets. Furthermore, only about 5.5B rounds of ammunition, or 27 rounds per gun are manufactured in the US each year. Clearly, there could be much more shooting. If each of the 15M unemployed were encouraged to squeeze of just 100 rounds per day, the increase in GDP from ammunition sales alone would be $150B. The ripple effect on the economy from hospital visits and funerals might double that. Take street crime. Like our Defense Department, most people deploy weapons only when threatened with mortal danger. There are thousands of unreported incidents in which citizens defend themselves with a gun, preventing a crime. More guns, less crime. Take prison overpopulation. Relieve the guards, give all the prisoners guns, lock the gates, and cover your ears. Take foreign entanglements. Having our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is expensive and dangerous. It would be better to withdraw leaving all the guns behind. What’s the point of bringing them the gift of freedom while denying them their Second Amendment rights? Take litigation costs. To avoid protracted wrangling of lawyers in overcrowded courts, allow lawyers to fight duels on behalf of their clients. The return of this noble custom will shorten litigations and reduce the oversupply of lawyers while increasing quality. Any lawyer you hire has probably never lost. Take academic tenure that protects dead wood professors. That’s what the guns-on-campus laws can solve. Take Medicare costs. Much money is spent futilely prolonging lives. Instead of a bureaucratic death panel choosing your time, how about a performance-based approach? On each birthday after your seventieth, your heirs have the right to pursue and shoot you for twenty-four hours. If you can evade them by any means, your time has not come. Afterwards, of course, a wonderful birthday party can be held. Additional funds for your support can be garnered by televising these yearly games as a reality series. Take the overfishing of whales. If you were a whale would you support the National Rifle Association? At first, you think “No,” but our big-brained cousin might reason as follows: The NRA advocates the ownership of guns that kill only people and small animals. Saturday night specials and Glocks would not penetrate a whale’s heavy coat of blubber. On the other hand, humans do threaten whales through overfishing, pollution, global warming, and nuclear weapons. So, “By all means,” the whales might think, “let us encourage gun ownership, and it may serve to lessen the number of humans amongst us.” In the long term, gun ownership is self-correcting. Statistics show that gun owners and their family members are 2.4 times more likely to be murdered than non-owners. They shoot their families; their families shoot them or other people in the neighborhood. In time, the gun-loving gene should disappear. Ironically, the one thing the NRA is surely not remedying is tyrannical government. The Second Amendment is not for facilitating hunting or shooting one’s friends; it’s for the peoples’ right to resist the government. At the time of the framing, the government had only rudimentary arms; so not infringing the people’s right to have rifles was sufficient. But now the government has much bigger weapons. The government’s equipment used at Waco included nine Bradley fighting vehicles, five combat-engineer vehicles, one tank-retrieval vehicle, and two M1A1 Abrams tanks. Did you know it’s illegal to own a tank unless you disable its cannon? If Osama bin Ladin can buy one, why can’t you? If the government can have tanks, stealth bombers, and nukes, why can’t the people? Why can’t someone buy a B2 bomber to kill all 535 Congress people at once rather than pick them off one at a time? Only the wealthy can afford these items, but groups of citizens could join together for their purchase. If nukes are outlawed only outlaws will have nukes. As the re-arming Germans said in 1930’s: Messerschmitts don’t kill Frenchmen; Germans kill Frenchmen. Not only would private ownership of weapons of mass destruction fulfill the framers intent, it would also open up our domestic market for the defense industry. Why isn’t the NRA promoting the sale of modern, powerful weapons? Maybe the whales really are behind it. Footnotes